Memoirs of Impossible Identities: Exploring Biographical Narratives of Gay Jehovah’s Witnesses

This article offers a critical examination of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ positionality on homosexuality. After making the case for engaging with memoir literature, the article analyses two narratives that depict the experiences of gay Jehovah’s Witnesses: Paul Mendez’s Rainbow Milk (Dialogue Books, 2020) and Daniel Allen Cox’s I Felt The End Before It Came (Viking, 2023). The critical discussion of narratives and meta-narratives interrogate the social world behind the Witnesses, as well as the relationships between the enactment of their beliefs in relation to LGBTQ+ identities. The resultant thematic analysis explores the following issues: disfellowshipping, identity negotiation, and sex work and education.